


I am Good and I am Grounded

by desperately_human



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, M/M, Murder, Scorcher Kennedy POV, Suicide, casefic, death by fire, first person POV i will die on this hill its How the Books are Written, is kind of a major part of the case, maybe au in that what happens after the ending isn't really what is implied by the end of the book?, much hurt/some comfort, self-harm mention, so spoilers for everything in the book, this takes place after the end of Broken Harbor, tw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:54:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25313419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desperately_human/pseuds/desperately_human
Summary: I don’t have bad cases. Won’t even use the words: if you go around saying, this is gonna be a bad one, then presto, you’re mucking up even the smallest decisions and surprise of surprises, your case goes wrong. Mark Dolan’s murder was everything I hate. That shouldn’t have stopped me from getting a solve, but it drew my eyes off the ball for a minute. Sometimes that is all it takes.(A year after the events of Broken Harbor, Mick "scorcher" Kennedy is back on the police force and solving a new case, still processing traumas and navigating broken relationships.)
Relationships: Richie Curran/Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy
Comments: 19
Kudos: 4





	I am Good and I am Grounded

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cosmo_is_Beink_Melon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cosmo_is_Beink_Melon/gifts).



> You've already read this but I wanted it properly noted that you were so much my motivation for finishing this fic and making it as good as it is. Talking to you about BH was Everything and I love you.

I don’t have bad cases. Won’t even use the words: if you go around saying _this is gonna be a bad one_ then presto, you’re mucking up even the smallest decisions and surprise of surprises, your case goes wrong. Mark Dolan’s murder was everything I hate. That shouldn’t have stopped me from getting a solve, but it drew my eyes off the ball for a minute. Sometimes that is all it takes. 

February is a treacherous month; it says to you _don’t worry, spring is just around the corner_ in the same way I remember my father saying _she’ll be better any day now_ every morning for a month until the day my mother did get out of bed and come to breakfast with us, and then cried so hard that our undercooked slices of toast were salted with tears and I wished she would just go back to her room. Over the years I’ve developed tricks for dealing with this: I spend thirty minutes every morning looking over case notes in front of my full-spectrum lamp, I delete all the slow-sad songs from my iPod at the beginning of December and don’t re-load them until mid-March, and I spend an hour on the treadmill three times a week to keep away physical lethargy. That winter, none of those things seemed to be enough, and I found myself spending increasingly more time at Lanigan’s, warming my insides with hot whiskey and failing to focus on the details of the particularly brutal but straightforward domestic killings O’Kelly had been throwing my way for months.

Ever since I had accepted O’Kelly’s offer to take a few weeks off and come back to the force, slightly over a year ago, I had started drinking down at the pub on St Stephen’s Green after work, though every time I gave in and slipped into my accustomed seat at end of the bar, I disgusted myself anew. A year before, I would have said that the only reason to spend an evening at your local pub was networking—showing the other lads you weren’t above them, were ready to muck in and pay for your rounds of stale lager and take your turn telling stomach-turning stories about the stupid mistakes your current suspects made. Lately I hadn’t been going for the company, much the opposite, I had a dark glare reserved purely for warning away the rookies intrigued by stories they had heard of me, or older colleagues feeling charitable after their third pint and ready to do me the favor of spending an evening pretending nothing had changed. I don’t have much respect for people who drink on their own. Never have: it’s weak, filling yourself with substances that intentionally invite a lack of control because you can’t handle the things in your head by yourself. If you can’t do your job and still sleep without chemical help, you shouldn’t be doing it at all. But every day since Dina had gotten her life back in its precarious track and returned to her old flat, the thought of facing those empty rooms, with the violent flatness of their blank walls, had become increasingly unbearable. Those nights holding my breath for the turn of her key in the lock, those days out at Broken Harbor with the incessant pull of the waves, had knocked loose something in my own head and at night I often woke to find myself suddenly, horribly aware of every little, untraceable, unstoppable sound in the building: the fizz and burn of lightbulbs, the panicked rocking of the neighbor’s dishwasher against the wall. On the worst nights, I woke out of dreams where claws scrabbled at the walls, clawing at my own skin as I tried to let them out. I should have seen my therapist again, should have pulled myself together and found some new exercises and sorted out what was inside my mind so I could overpower it, lock it away, and move on. The thought exhausted me, and day by day the whiskey kept the sounds quiet.

Lanigan’s was a quintessential cop bar. Perhaps I should have found a new watering hole as soon as I realized that the local uniform boys, and by extension Richie Curran, drank here too. But I can be a stubborn son-of-a-bitch when I need to be, and even sometimes when I don’t, and I refused to let some failed detective who meant nothing to me now keep me away from _my_ drinking spot. So I got a glimpse of him every now and then, perhaps more when I was low or especially drunk, or thinking of the Spain case. Too often, recently.

_The first time I noticed Richie noticing me there, I expected him to make his excuses and never come back. I was both the higher rank and the aggrieved party, not to mention the stories I could tell his new uniform pals if petty revenge had been my style. But Richie never had much respect for the chain of command, and I wasn’t the one with something to be ashamed of, so I held my seat and even held his gaze for a minute, until he opened his mouth as if to speak to me across that crowded room and I looked away, a sour taste in my mouth. We played this back-and-forth game for months, and reluctantly I gave Richie some credit for his tenacity. Once he even came to speak to me, likely emboldened by drink and a bad day at work._

_‘Mi—Detective Kennedy,’ though he had caught himself, he had clearly begun to use my first name. I could hear my skull grate against itself as I clenched my teeth trying to look impassive, trying not to look as though I would take a bite out of his head if he didn’t move in three seconds. ‘I know you probably don’t want to talk to me—' two, one, I had had enough._

_‘Damn right I don’t. And you don’t want to talk to me, because whatever you’re looking for—is uniform too boring for you? Not enough decisions? You want me to put in a good word for you? Or is it forgiveness still, you want me to tell you that I’ve thought about it all and it turns out you did the right thing after all? I’ve changed my mind and, oh, I’m fine with people being killed now, actually. Because whatever it is, I can tell you right now you’re not getting it from me. I’ve done you enough bloody favors: you don’t deserve to be a detective, and I never want you to come over here again.’ There were heads turning towards us, my voice had risen more than I realized. I took a hard breath, let it out slowly, tried to sound calm as I asked ‘Got that?’_

_He got it, or at least pretended to. Only kept his mouth open for a second too long, then nodded, gathered up his little bit of dignity, and walked away. He didn’t stop glancing at me on late nights, with that stupid, hopeful sincerity, but he didn’t come over again. I caught myself running my hands along the splintered underside of the old wood table, digging fingers into my thighs, to stop myself from wondering if he still thought about how he had said we would be partners for a good while, how I had been the idiot who believed it._

I had spent an unusually long time in the pub the night before the call out, and I had a dull, smokey pain creeping up from the base of my neck and into my temples to show for it. It wasn’t a big deal case, just one of those that got thrown to the man whose name was next on the rota, so I barely glanced up from the paperwork I was finishing off when the new kid in the administrative office tossed the file onto my desk. He stood there, fidgeting as I crossed the last ‘t’ and signed my name at the bottom of the page, waited until I looked up before saying ‘It’s a fire. Possible homicide.’

‘Thanks,’ I nodded to him, unsure why he was still standing there—did he expect to be tipped? But once I had made eye contact, he scuttled away and left me alone with the case file. There wasn’t much more information there: the fire had almost entirely destroyed a two-story town house in one of the nicer neighborhoods across the city, but left the neighboring homes mostly untouched. The fire brigade had battled the blaze for much of the night—since a 999 call came in at 1:34 am—and only in the past hour had deemed the wreckage safe to explore. Whatever evidence had not been destroyed by the fire would have been completely trampled by the firemen before they found the charred body and notified homicide. All this would have been tragic but routine, but for a note at the end of the file which stated that the fire chief believe the fire had been set deliberately—something about the rapidity with which the blaze had spread and the probable presence of accelerants. This was unconfirmed, it would take at least another hour for forensic tests to come back, but was enough to file the death as _potential homicide_ and demand the presence of a murder detective with nothing more important on his plate.

Leaving the station, I detoured to the bathroom, swallowing two paracetamol with a handful of coppery-tasting tap water. I gripped the cracked porcelain of the sink and stared back into my own slightly red eyes gazing out from the mirror. _I am capable,_ I told that face in the mirror, _I am strong, I am confident. My intentions shape my reality._ I spun on my heel and slammed the door on the way out, ready to face the day.

The Dolan house left a gap like a rotten tooth in the otherwise pristine street: neat row-houses in tasteful pastels dropping suddenly off into a pile of charred wood and crumbled walls. Here and there a piece of the architecture was left precariously standing—some support beams marking out what used to be internal walls, the hint of a staircase. The houses on either side had wide burn-marks marring the outer walls, but appeared curiously undamaged compared to the complete wreckage beside them. That must have been the reason for the initial suggestion of arson—that the center house had gone up so cleanly suggested copious amounts of accelerant which was not present in the surrounding buildings. Larry, the scene tech, was already poking around the wreckage with a few of his associates and a young uniformed officer, chatting happily with a few men and women from the fire brigade still at the scene. He waved me over as I slipped on gloves and shoe covers, and one of the fire officers handed me a yellow hard-hat—we were being allowed onto the scene only cautiously by the fire marshals, who couldn’t yet guarantee structural soundness. Water squelched under my feet from the soaked and charred boards, and as I approached the others my head flooded with a sickening combination of the smells of wood ash, petrol, and burned flesh. 

The body itself was hardly recognizable as such: limbs curled at unnatural angles, blackened skin fused to the skull so the face, turned toward the sky, looked hollowed out, mouth open too wide in a silent howl that granted a view of the grey ash coating his throat. 

‘Skipping the pleasantries?’ Larry begun, and I nodded, ‘Good. On to the interesting stuff: scene was already pretty messed up when we got here, thanks to these fire lads doing their job.’ I nodded at them as well, flashed a professional half-smile to show there were no ill feelings. ‘But we’re guessing your lad here was in the bedroom. Used to be roughly there, according to the neighbors.’ He pointed at a spot several feet above my head. “Also, I’m assuming you can smell that petrol.’

‘We’re working to trace exactly what the substance is,’ the uniform piped up. He looked vaguely ill, something I couldn’t blame him for but which he was going to have to learn to hide a lot better if he wanted to get anywhere near the big cases again, ‘but it’s everywhere.’

‘Thanks,’ I focused on the uniform as Larry wandered off to further explore the wreckage, a worried fire marshal tagging behind him. ‘Any witnesses?’

‘Victim’s teenage daughter, sir.’ His jerked his head at the squad car parked a way down the block, out of the way of most of the commotion but still within view of the house, ‘Brigit. My partner’s with her now. She made the 999 call. Out of the house apparently, came back and—’

‘Enough,’ I try never to hear important witness statements second-hand: the more people get their fingerprints all over a thing, the less useful it is. ‘I’ll speak to her myself.’

There was little else to see at the crime scene, though I walked the rough floor plan of the house again and exchanged nods with Cooper the pathologist when he arrived. Finally, there was nothing left for it but to speak to the grieving daughter. I had the uniforms drive her back to the station and put her in our most comfortable interrogation room, with mostly-clean carpet and a single window, the space where we usually speak to witnesses and family members or suspects we want to lull into a false sense of security. We had learned the Brigit Dolan was barely eighteen, but I still requested a social worker present for the interview. This was for the dual reasons that I try to make sure all my statements are airtight, and that ‘barely’ could have left an opening for a skilled defense barrister to slip in a little doubt as to the girl’s credibility, and because it is always wise to have two people present for interviews and I didn’t want to bring a second detective this early in the case. O’Kelly mostly lets me work alone, a situation which suits all of us.

Brigit Dolan was small-boned and looked younger than her years, pretty in the unfocused, pastel way of children in impressionist paintings, even shaken and hungry as she looked now. Her eyes were red with crying and she folded in on herself, still wearing her pink wool coat all buttoned up. She rocked slightly in her chair and stared down at the scratches carved in the table.

‘Is there anyone we can call? To be with you?’ I asked the top of her bowed head. To someone else this might have looked like compassion. Me, I saw it as the weakness it was: you should never let your witnesses check their stories with someone else before they talk to you, no matter how cut up they are. People, like everything down to the smallest sub-atomic particles, influence each other with every interaction. The only hope of getting the true, uncut story is to pull it out of your witness before they have time to cross-check their facts with anyone, even themselves. But this too-thin, blue-eyed girl reminded me too much of my sister, sobbing herself awake every day for weeks after, not understanding that she had been saved but only that our mother had gone and left her behind. The fizzing ache in my skull was getting worse, and I wouldn’t tell if it was the evil of what had happened there, or the smell of charred flesh still lingering in my nose, or just a hangover.

‘No one,’ she shook her head like a spasm, wiped a hand across her nose and left a trail of snot on her smooth cheek, ‘It was just me ’n him.’

‘Not your mother?’ The social worker asked, and I shot her a glare over the girl’s head. Her place was to be a silent support, hand out tissues if necessary, not to ask potentially upsetting questions of _my_ witness.

‘My mam died…she, she killed herself. Two years ago now. She jumped off Beckett Bridge.’ I felt my stomach clench. Samuel Beckett Bridge isn’t high—though it is phenomenally ugly in the way new artsy structures are—Brigit’s mother wouldn’t have died on impact but drowned slowly in the icy water underneath. ‘They found her body. People kept saying we were lucky, like. To have a body. To have a proper funeral. _Lucky.’_ She spit out the last word and I had a vision of what Brigid Dolan must have been like two days ago: vivid and sarcastic, not sallow-skinned and hollowed out by grief. The social worker opened her mouth and reached out to touch Brigit’s arm, but caught my gaze this time and settled back in her seat, looking slightly resentful.

‘Tell me about last night, Brigit.’ The best way to get the information from her would be to get her talking about the facts, not focusing on emotions.

‘Okay,’ she took a breath, swallowed, repeated ‘okay. What do you need to know?’

‘Did anything unusual happen yesterday? Did you father _mention_ anything unusual?’

‘No,’ she hardly thought about it, ‘it was just a normal day. I went to school, and a café afterwards. To study. I got home and dad was tired; long day, just. Nothing special. I made us dinner. Pasta with garlic bread, a nice wine. We just talked. It’s always like that, ever since my mam. We’re all each other have. I come home and do dinner and maybe we watch some telly. Like a family. That’s how it was. Normal, like. And then,’ her breath stuttered, words tripping over each other, ‘and then he went. Went to bed. And…’ She trailed off, breathing quickly. Her eyes flickered back and forth, caught on some image we couldn’t see.

‘You’re being very helpful, Brigit. Just a little longer, now.’ My headache was getting worse, pinpricks of light stabbing at the backs of my eyes. I should have pushed her on that account of the afternoon—something _must_ have happened and somewhere in my mind I knew this even then—but all I wanted was to get the interview finished and get out of the building, go somewhere where I could breathe fresh air and close my eyes and be alone to process the case without the social worked shifting in her chair and the faint smell of smoke that still poured off Brigit’s coat. ‘If you could just tell me about last night. Why were you out of the house?’

‘I went for a cigarette,’ she said, ‘he didn’t know I smoked. Just when I’m stressed, like, and I was trying to give them up. But I couldn’t sleep last night and I was just gasping…I stayed out, nowhere really, just walking. And I smoked three. God, if I had only had one, maybe…’she gave a full-body shudder, looked at me as if for re-assurance. When she didn’t receive any, she went on, a little calmer. ‘I got back to the house and…someone must have been watching for me to leave, mustn’t they? There were flames everywhere. So I called 999 and I waited across the road.’

‘Did you try to enter the house?’ She showed none of the usual injuries on her hands or face, but it would surprise the average civilian to know how many people run straight for the door of a burning building when they think a loved one might be inside. The ones you do hear about are the lucky few, those who discover the flames haven’t yet reached the kitchen and their wife or mother or child is right by the door; more commonly after the first wave of flames to the face they fall back, badly burned but secure in their mind that they did their best. Sometimes they push harder, make it two deaths instead of one: the newspapers don’t like to report those stories.

‘No, I…they always say you’re not supposed to do that, right? And I figured the fire men would sort it.’ She looked at me then, not turned away in sorrow but dead in the eyes, and there was an anger there. As if in her mind we were blended, the fire men and the guards and all authority and we _hadn’t_ sorted it. Some detectives never get over this, the anger from victim’s families. I don’t mind it much, it’s not our job to be liked, it’s our job to get to the truth. Despite what wide-eyed kids like Curran want to think, the two rarely go together. It gave me the push to ask the next question.

‘Brigit, I need you to think. Was there anyone you can think of who could have wanted to hurt your father?’ This question has to be asked, although it often does little good this early in the investigation. People in the early stages of mourning tend to have one of two responses to this question: complete denial that the victim could have so much as insulted a barista ever in his life, or a list of everyone from the neighbor who didn’t like to pick up his dog-shit to the employee caught snacking on his shift. From what I had seen, I expected Brigit Dolan to fall into the first category, and she did not disappoint.

‘Dad wasn’t. He didn’t have _enemies._ He wasn’t that kind of guy. He was…good.’ She was starting to tear up again. I tried to get my questions in quickly, before those tears turned into a full flood.

‘What about his work? Anything, Brigit?’

‘Work was. I don’t know. He was a building contractor. So, like, maybe someone he worked for. But…’ She trailed off. Her sniffles swelled into full sobs: I had lost her. She gasped out, ‘he can’t be _gone._ He can’t be. Bring him _back!’_ She reached out for my arm, and I pulled away fast. Her open hand fell onto the table, clenching and unclenching. She was so like a child then, with her impossible demand and her open-mouthed, unselfconscious sobbing. So like another little girl who had lost her mother. I pushed the thoughts away.

I let her go then. I sent her to the hotel a few blocks from Dublin Castle where we stash witnesses with nowhere else to go. As a legal adult, I wasn’t required to insist someone stay with her, so I sent her off on her own. I let her go. I would look over this decision, later: wonder if I really thought she was one of those who would stand back and watch the blaze, wonder if I felt sorry for her, wonder whether if I hadn’t been drinking I would have recognized that ringing in my temples for what it was. This much is true: I let her go because I wanted her gone, and I will have to live with that every day of my life.

Information filtered in throughout the day, bit by bit. It’s an irony of murder cases that while everyone knows we get a much higher solve rate in the first forty-eight hours than any time afterward, if you don’t catch the guy standing there with the knife, it takes quite a while for relevant information to collect.

O’Kelly called me in for a briefing in the early afternoon and assigned me Sam O’Neill as a second. O’Neill is a good sort, inoffensive and patient and a hard worker, not a newbie, but I didn’t feel like playing with others so I gave him half the room to work on the job angle and went back to my own desk. Larry and his lab boys identified the accelerant as a brand of gasoline used in small machines, and a few hours later matched it with an empty can inside the Dolan’s back shed beside their lawn mower. I pulled a few of the floaters in from door-to-door and sent them on a resentful search through bins in the neighborhood for other empty cans.

O’Neill briefed me at six: no obvious leads relating to Mark’s work, not a client yet had been found who would say worse than that he had been late on getting work done, and what did they expect from a contractor? The door-to-doors turned up a neighbor who had seen Brigit across the street smoking while the flames burned, but couldn’t say for sure whether it was before or after the 999 call, so that gave us nothing. One of the floaters suggested that it was ‘weird,’ his word, that Brigit had kept smoking while waiting for the fire brigade, but people do all sorts of nonsensical things in times of stress. At eight, I pulled the door-to-doors in, and by nine, when it became obvious that there wasn’t much more to do besides wait for the post mortem results and resume questionings the next day, I gathered them around for a final address.

‘Alright, people. You’ve put in some solid work today. But we’re missing something, and it’s something big. No one gets murdered because they’re a plain-old nice guy. There is _something_ in Mark Dolan’s life, something he did, to make himself a target. So tomorrow I want you all to come in with fresh eyes, find new witnesses, go through everything we have again until you find what Mark Dolan did to make someone burn him and his whole house down.’ I sent them home, with instructions to be back bright and early the next day. Alone in the station, I organized our files and re-read what I could until my eyes started blurring and I knew I had to leave. I thought of going home, of my cold flat and nothing on telly, of my dry mouth and that awful smell still whenever I closed my eyes, and turned toward Lanigan’s.

Dublin, you realize after living there your whole life, is a small city. You can go years without seeing a face and then the moment it becomes an important, distracting imperative to avoid someone, there they are. For three years I never caught a glimpse of Frank Mackey, for instance, though if I had I would have treated him to a frosty smile and not bothered to stop and say hello. Nothing as petty as a slight, just to show him that my mind was busy with more important things. And yet the second things started to go bad, there he was. Perhaps I should have expected this: Mackey, like all good detectives—and he _was_ a good detective, at his core, though he threw away a lot of potential on being maverick and disagreeable just to show he thought too much of himself to buckle down and respect the system—have the ability to sense blood in the water. I hated to admit it, but I had fallen beyond self-deception—I was giving off prey vibrations, unchecked glimmers of pain and anger and confusion shining out through all the little cracks the Spain case had left in me.

‘Scorcher, my lad,’ Mackey was an excellent judge of body language—undercovers have to be, even more than the rest of us—so the only explanation for his presence at my elbow was that he had seen how very much I wanted to be alone and was intent on ruining that for me. ‘How’s that solve rate?’ The solve rate was passable, solidly in the middle of the pack, and I was sure he knew it: look at Scorcher Kennedy, so proud of being the best, now he’s down here with all the rest of us. I heard the others whisper it sometimes in my head, smacked my ears to make the crazy settle down, and knew they were right. Mackey might think he was upsetting me, rubbing salt in the wound, but nothing said would be anything I hadn’t gone over in my mind a dozen times already. And concluded that it was right, and just, and entirely accurate for me to have lost my standing as the top murder D. I could have said that God, or whatever ran these things, was punishing me for what happened with the Spain case, and I know many detectives who would have taken that way out because choosing that option took the failure out of their hands. But I know that how you see yourself, positive thinking and constant control and the knowledge that you _can_ and _will_ win, is what pushes champions to victory, and I didn’t need numbers to prove what I knew in my heart already. I wasn’t that man, that winner, anymore. At best I was a failure, at worst a fraud. Perhaps both, since I didn’t have the courage to leave when I knew I should have. Instead I put on old reflections of the person I used to be every morning like armor, pretending to have the certainty and faith I used to have. I still smiled and back-slapped and everyone else smiled back, nothing much had changed, I just hadn’t realized before how lonely it was. Sometimes cases split themselves into shades of gray, into a rainbow of colors that settled in my temples like a migraine, and it took every ounce of my strength and control to make myself see in black and white again.

‘Fine thanks,’ I answered Mackey, deliberately looking over his right shoulder in an old trick of showing boredom so strong it became physical. ‘How’s undercover. Oh yes, you can’t talk about it. Not much to discuss then.’ I glanced at his face, gave him a sharp nod of dismissal, and lifted my drink. At a table by the wall sat Richie Curran, looking as misplaced in his oversized uniform as he had in a jacket and tie and trying to smile with the other lads as though he belonged, one hand absently doodling invisible patterns onto the sticky table. Unfortunately, Mackey caught where my gaze had landed and leaned toward me confidentially.

‘Your other half told me to be gentle on you, apparently the last case ‘was rough on him.’ Nice to have someone fighting in your corner. Is that why you dropped him?’ My first instinct was relief: so he didn’t know all the sickening details. Hard on its heels came fury—Richie had been talking to Frank, talking _about me._ I had a visceral longing to smash their heads together, watch the cracks splintering through their skulls. I dug my fingernails into my palm, pulled it together: everything else in life is useless without self-control. I had lost sight of that for a moment during the Spain case, a bare flicker of a time that had been just enough for Richie and Dina and Jenny to give me a shove that threatened to destabilize my whole life. Since then I had buttoned down that control very carefully in every relationship and interaction. I examined closely the ways I had gone wrong, cut myself off from saying a single word too many in conversations, yanked myself back from any connection that tried to fool me into thinking it was anything but self-serving. People trip you up, trick you into late night chats, into thinking that they’re real and they think you’re real. I pitied people like Breslin and McCann, those partners I used to quietly envy, who hadn’t learned these lessons: growing together like twinned oak trees, thinking they had found a way through the mess by tying themselves to someone else. One day they would learn, I knew, and they would each fall father and hurt harder than I did because they had built so much upon that illusion. Spite is a shallow and unproductive emotion, but I admit it warmed something sharp and hard inside me when I thought of that.

‘I wouldn’t put too much store in what Curran says,’ I held my voice steady, Mackey would only be delighted to know he had made me angry, ‘he isn’t likely to be anything but a uniform any time soon. That’s what usually happens to people who conceal evidence in a murder inquiry.’ I said it to get a reaction from Mackey, to remind him that I hadn’t forgotten, hadn’t forgiven, that even though he had won that round no one in murder would ever properly trust him again. People think I hate Frank Mackey because he pulled one over on me; what they don’t understand is that Mackey frustrates me not because of what he did, but because actions have logical consequences and he seemed to have escaped his. While no smart murder D would give information to Mackey anymore, he has earned a grudging sort of respect from most of the squad for solving that decades-cold case—perhaps more so because it was _my_ case—and as far as I knew he was still sailing along fine at undercover, and even his marriage seemed to have come back together. It must have been this emotional reaction to Mackey’s presence which I had allowed to slip through that let me to make that misstep, not realizing until it was too late that all I had really done was give him more ammunition.

‘Concealing information from you, huh?’ He even smiled as he said it, ‘This is becoming a pattern, Scorcher. Maybe you ought to think about what you do that invites it.’ Having got the last jab in, Mackey disappeared into the crowd, leaving me to drain my whiskey and stare at the blood filling in the valleys of the crumpled beer mat crushed too tightly in my hand.

If Richie had turned out to be the cop he pretended, he would have handled Brigit Dolan. Talked her down, given her a handkerchief, made her feel heard and appreciated and gotten some sort of useful information out of her. Where I had just wrapped her in paper and stored her away in the hotel until I was more ready to deal with her, letting her testimony warp with time like the wood paneling in a house by the sea. I handle things on my own, and that’s no less than should be expected of any professional, but ordering another drink and shuddering at the crackle of the fire in the grate, refusing to smart from Frank’s needling, I let myself think for a moment that I _deserved_ someone.

I could walk over, could say _I don’t know what the hell to do with this kid. You have to grow up so quickly, when your parent dies, she’s already done it. She’s already put on that armor, the kind that says ‘stay the hell out of my family and my secrets and my life.’ The kind that’s stronger than leather or steel because it’s formed from grief, patched and re-patched and smoothed stiff and shiny from a limitless well of sorrow and anger and fused too tightly to your body, to your soul—and Richie, I don’t know how to make her drop it._ And even if he didn’t understand he would nod, buy us another pint, sit down next to me and draw those mindless patterns on my skin so I could feel that he was really there. _She won’t tell me the truth about her father and I don’t know if it’s because there’s something to hide or just that she’s gotten used to never telling the truth about anything, and I’m supposed to peel that armor off her piece by piece but I’m scared of what I’ll find underneath._ That she’s guilty? he would ask, because he was still young and naive and to him that would be the worst thing possible. _No,_ I would answer, and wouldn’t feel stupid for saying the words out loud, _that she’s in pain. I’m scared if I break her down I’m going to drown in all the pain she’s holding back. I’m scared she’ll tell me how you’re supposed to feel when your mum drowns herself and your dad disappears and I won’t—_ his head snapped up, and I realized I had been staring at him for minutes, unspooling the narrative in my mind. I flicked my gaze away—this was stupid. This was unimaginably, self-indulgently, pathetically idiotic. I must have been far more drunk than I thought, to let those thoughts echo in my head, to fantasize about sharing them with someone. Never mind that I was thinking, foggy-headed, of the person who had betrayed my confidence so greatly that he was the last human in the world I should be thinking of sharing anything damaging with—some leftover delusions sneaking in from nights in empty houses with sandwiches, morning coffee before post-mortems; useless memories that refused to be forgotten. It was unimaginable that I was wishing for this at all, to let lose those secret fears and stories that I had spent my whole career holding so close to my chest they melted into the jacket I wore each morning, invisible but heavy.

The case was wrecking my head. I had learned something from the Jenny and Pat and Richie and Quigley—they reminded me that I was not invincible. That I had to look of the cracks in my own armor as well as in others. I left the last swallow of my whiskey on the table and pulled my jacket on as if I was pulling all the lose pieces of me that had tumbled out onto the floor back into myself. Tomorrow I would have forensic reports, the post-mortem, statements from door-to-doors. Real, solid facts and not fantasies sliding into my own useless memories. I would eke out every last drop of information from every resource I had, and I wouldn’t go back to Brigit Dolan until I had a wall of facts and certainties to build between us.

My flat was cold when I returned—I move the thermostat down when I leave in the mornings, no sense wasting power heating rooms that stand empty fifteen hours out of the day—but the cold was worse that evening, a damp chill that worked itself into my bones. The bedroom window was open, only a few inches but enough to let a wintry draft in. I slammed it shut, wondering if this was some ill-conceived prank of my sister’s, a way to remind me that she still had my spare key and could throw my life into chaos any time she wanted. But then I remembered the past night, waking from nightmares of crashing waves and summer sunlight, throwing off bedclothes and wrenching the window open to smell the polluted city air and remind myself I was safe. I felt a brief flash of disappointment, quenched quickly—it was good for everyone that Dina had stayed away for as long as she had. Leaving me alone meant that she was alright, that she didn’t need me. That the nightmare of four months ago was still over.

_I had been busy questioning a suspect—some little shite who had stabbed his drug dealer in a fit of pique and was now claiming, despite mountains of evidence, never to have even known the guy—when the call from the hospital came though. Twenty minutes later I stepped out of the interrogation room on a fake coffee break—give the suspect time to stew, wonder if you’re ever coming back for him, time to reconsider his shaky position with regard to the truth—and found the missed call on my cell. People talk about intuition like it’s some kind of magic, like it comes from God or even worse from your emotions, but intuition is just your brain picking up and processing data that you haven’t consciously registered and drawing a logical conclusion. Whatever tiny clues my subconscious was picking up in those moments, they told me to walk down the hall to our worst interview room—badly lit and off-smelling, hardly enough room for two chairs, but as far as I could get from anyone’s curious ears—before I called back. The young doctor on the other end of the line kept repeating ‘she’s perfectly safe,’ which struck me as a fairly moronic thing to say about someone who had just stuck her hand through a plate-glass window and needed twenty-three stitches and a blood transfusion._

_It took no time at all to convince Breslin to take over my interview. The man had a deeply ingrained love of the sound of his own voice, which the other lads made fun of but which I found made him better company than most—he never paused to ask me any probing questions, for example—and also made him jump at the chance of questioning other people’s suspects. In the two minutes it took to explain the situation to O’Kelly I could feel the adrenaline kicking in, making every item and sound in the room stand out bright and clear, and the muscles at the base of my jaw clench as O’Kelly shuffled papers and turned the request over in his mind. There’s a reason our bodies come with this built-in panic response, and many times I have thanked God for it, but not as I was sitting in that office with the bells in my brain jangling fight-or-flight when there was nothing to defend against and I was preparing to run toward the only thing that scared me. O’Kelly checked the computer and informed me that I had three weeks of leave saved up, if I needed it, and as long as I could re-assign my cases I was free to go. As I moved to stand, he reached out and laid a hand on my shoulder, and to my horror I saw the sympathy in his eyes. God knows what Quigley had said to him about Dina, but it had obviously stuck. For a moment I was sixteen again, my nails biting into my palm as I made a fist, ready to swing at him. But I had more control now; I thanked him through gritted teeth and called Geri from the car._

_‘Does your sister have a personal or family history of self-harm?’ The doctor looked even younger in person than he had sounded, and he read the words aloud from the page, not looking into my eyes. I wanted to laugh, wanted to smack him upside the head and ask if he’d even spoken to my sister, but I knew every minute she spent in this bright, sterile building full of beeps and moaning and condolences would be fraying Dina’s already fragile mind. So I straightened my back and lifted my chin and made sure to answer like a top homicide detective and not like a worried brother when I told him no, no, and no, this must be a freak accident, there was nothing he could do, and could I please take my sister home now. He fought it a little—clearly they had spoken, and he was just the type to fall for Dina’s fragile brand of charm, to think that he alone could save her from the car crash in her mind—but eventually his fear of authority won out and in fifteen minutes we were walking through the parking lot, me clutching a pile of Mental Health and You brochures the earnest young doctor had pressed into my hand, Dina scratching fitfully at her neck and upper arms to try and remove the disinfectant smell that even I had felt leeching into my pores every minute we spent in that building._

_‘What happened?’ I waited until we were driving to ask. I knew there was a risk that she might lash out at me then, claw for my eyes while I desperately tried to keep us on the road; it had happened before. But I needed to know, to call Geri with some story. The weakest part of me was hoping that she would have some rational explanation, that it really was just a silly accident, and I could drop her at her flat and get back to work before Breslin wrapped up my case._

_‘Hurt my hand,’ Dina said, not looking up from where she was slowly unpicking the bandage wound around her wrist with chipped red fingernails. ‘Des drove me here. Then he said we shouldn’t see each other again.’ Des was the boyfriend du jour, part owner of a record store, constant wearer of a jeans-jacket that would have been considered cool in the nineties, and apparently a certified little bollix. Cleary there would be no going back to regular life, not quickly. As if reading my mind—and uncanny trick she has sometimes, one which would make her a brilliant detective if she knew how to turn it on and off, how to know the difference between the times when she genuinely intuited a person’s thoughts and the paranoid stories her brain fed her—Dina asked, ‘do you have to get back to work, Mikey?’_

_‘No,’ I tried to be re-assuring, not to let my disappointment show, a trick which I have worked hard at over the years and which still has only about a fifty percent success rate when it comes to either of my sisters, ‘No, they’ve given me a lot of vacation time. I can stay with you as long as you need.’_

_‘Did you tell them your crazy sister was in hospital?’ Dina had shown a renewed interest in my work, not usually in a positive way, since meeting Richie and her time at the station with Quigley. Not that I could blame her for being increasingly suspicious, not after all that, but I missed the days when a single mention of my caseload would have her pretending to die of boredom. I don’t like to lie to Dina—part of this is conscience, certainly, but mostly it’s that lies are difficult to keep track of and I don’t like to use them when there isn’t a good reason, especially not with someone who has my sister’s predilection for picking apart stories. So mostly I tell her the truth._

_‘I did tell my boss I had to spend some time with you. He knows you have...issues.’ Her head snapped up, peeling bandage forgotten, and she laughed a chilly, brittle laugh._

_‘I’m not a magazine subscription, Mikey. I don’t have_ issues _. I could hear it getting colder today, you know. The wooden tables were all trying to huddle together, I had to keep pulling them apart.’_

_Back in my flat she turned up the heat until I found myself sweating through my shirt, and wrapped herself in a pile of blankets on the couch. I sat beside her, staring at the blank wall where I had never bothered to hang anything, the window beside it looking out to an uninspiring view of the street and the curtained windows of the flat across the way, and waited for her to speak or fall asleep. Her shoulders shook and at first I thought she was still shivering from her imagined cold, before I realized she was crying. Through the tears she gulped out ‘I had to Mikey,’ and then ‘I just needed to break something’ over and over, pounding her fists against her knees in a way that must have hurt her damaged hand. But I let her spend herself out, until the sobs stopped and her eyes drooped shut. As I started to get up I heard her whisper, just loud enough for me to hear, ‘I needed to break something that wasn’t me.’_

_‘Why is all of your music so fucking happy?’ she tapped me on the shoulder, headphones hanging around her neck. I was making breakfast: eggs, toast, sausages, fruit—I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before and I had no idea when the last time Dina has bothered to feed herself was. Without thinking about it, I smiled: this was so much more like my sister than the tears last night. ‘Oh look,’ she continued, sarcastic now, ‘you’re ‘happy’ now too. Are you trying to turn yourself into a fucking robot? Cause you’re getting there.’_

_‘I’m happy you’re here is all,’ I tried to re-assure her. ‘And I like that music. It makes me feel better. I don’t want to be sad all winter. Do you?’ As soon as I asked, I bit my tongue, flinching against the possible answer. I wasn’t sure what I would do if she said yes: crying and slapping her were both out, obviously, but I wasn’t sure I could smile and bear it either._

_‘And listening to the kind of music they play in exercise classes for pink-tracksuit, yummy-mummy zombies doesn’t make you sad? I’d kill myself if this was all I had to listen to.’ I looked up at her with a full-body jerk of movement that nicked my finger with the knife, but Dina was wandering around the kitchen, unconcerned, making grossed-out faces at my plain-white dishes and healthy cereals. I rinsed off the apple I had been cutting, popped a slice in my mouth like a spy in an old movie, as though that would get rid of any trace of blood, and ran my cut finger under water until the it ran clear, angling my body away so she wouldn’t see._

_I stayed off work and she stayed with me for a week and a half, then we went back to her flat, cathartically threw Des’s stuff out onto the street, and I left her. In the months since then she had gotten a job as a teller in a bank, cut and died her hair into a candy-floss pink bob, called once a week just to keep me happy, and not dropped by once._

When I arrived the next day, the post-mortem report was already sitting on my desk. Cooper starts work early, and once he gets around to doing my jobs, he works efficiently. There were few surprises: dental records confirmed that the victim was Mark Dolan, he had died from either burns or smoke inhalation—smoke in the lungs meant that he had still been alive when the fire started, though in my view, the location of the body in the bedroom suggested that he may not have been conscious enough to try to escape—and the burning on the corpse was too extensive to tell if there were any prior injuries. Cooper had noted that the burning was so severe, in fact, that be believed the victim himself had been drenched in the accelerant.

‘Suicide?’ O’Neill asked, with raised eyebrows, when I passed the report to him. But by all reports Mark Dolan seemed even less likely to take his own life than to be murdered. This is hardly evidence: the acquaintances of both suicides and murder victims are forever insisting their friends and family members would _never._ But the Dolan death just didn’t fit: I have attended suicides by fire before, but they tend to be committed by people desperate to bring attention to their pain, building on a pattern of increasingly erratic and dramatic behaviors, none of which Mark displayed. Which brought us back to murder: a deeply personal, intimate murder committed by someone with access to the house.

‘Who has background on Brigit Dolan?’ I asked the room, and a big guy with tousled hair and a face barely out of adolescence actually raised his hand. A few of the other giggled but I nodded for him to continue. Some people give me grief for not getting to know my floaters, their names and hobbies and deepest fears. I ask them this: would it help me solve the case? I know if they’re doing the work they’re supposed to, I know they report to me, that’s all I need.

‘Still in school: a very good student apparently, quiet but good, teachers expect great results on her Leaving Certs. A wobble a few years back, when her mother died: she got in fights with other students, I’m told they said things about her mam. Put one in hospital with a broken arm. After that they sent her to the school counselor. Can’t get those notes—confidentiality, you know—but she stopped going after a month. Got her grades back on track and stopped getting in trouble. Still doesn’t have many friends, by all accounts, keeps herself to herself.’

‘Kids say stupid stuff,’ O’Neill piped up, though he was clearly thinking the same as the rest of us and didn’t want to admit it, ‘and she was pretty traumatized. Doesn’t mean much.’

‘You,’ I snapped at him, pushing away memories of the other boys at school asking if my father hit my mother, asking if she did drugs, asking if I had guessed, ‘you’re supposed to be looking into Dolan’s work. Have you got _anywhere_ or are you just going to sit here making excuses for our other suspects?’ He looked away, shuffled papers, answered.

‘Still not much there. Found a plumber who punched him at a work do last year, thought Mark was flirting with his wife, but it’s been ages since then and besides he has an alibi. Other than that,’ he caught my eye, ‘I’ll just keep at it, shall I?’

I shuffled through the forensic reports again, hoping for something conclusive to jump out. Certainly Brigit Dolan was coming out far in the lead of our limited field of suspects: she had easy access to the petrol, and to Mark Dolan’s bedroom between midnight and 1:15. But Sam O’Neill was right, a spat of schoolyard scuffles after a significant trauma two years previously was hardly a motive for the calculated murder of a seemingly devoted parent. I was willing to admit that the conversation with Brigit yesterday has thrown me, and I wasn’t ready to confront her again until I had either a solid motive or a pile of conclusive physical evidence, preferably both.

It was past four when I got a call from the front desk saying there was a woman demanding to talk to whoever was in charge of the Mark Dolan case. I could have sent anyone, but I wasn’t getting much of anywhere with the forensics or the door-to-doors, so I went myself to meet the tall redhead in a long blue coat, blue eyeshadow smeared with tears.

‘You have information about the Dolan case?’ She turned to me, tears and anger blending in her eyes.

‘Why did no one tell me?’ she demanded, ‘No one told me Mark was dead. I had to find out on the news. Why has no one talked to me yet?’

‘I’m sorry,’ mentally I ran through who she could be, a sister or a coworker, and came up blank, ‘I’ll have someone take your statement now. You are?’

Genuine surprise momentarily wiped the anger off her face.

‘I’m his partner. His girlfriend. Shannon Dunne. Did Brigit not tell you?’

Fuck. I didn’t know how we could have missed that. Except for the obvious: Brigit had _not_ told us. No one had, dozens of interviews and not one person had mentioned a partner. Everything else on my schedule vanished—this was it, the clue we had missed, the thing that would break the case wide open. I knew it.

Shannon was staring at me, her anger returning, and I schooled my face to wipe away the shock that I had let show for a moment.

‘We’ll speak to you now,’ I said, deliberately not addressing her question. Any answer I gave would further diminisher her faith in us, the last thing we needed. I would rather have run the interview by myself, but this was more than a standard witness statement, so I grabbed O’Neill and gave him strict instructions to take notes and keep his mouth shut. We set Shannon up in the most comfortable room, where I had interviewed Brigit only the day before, and set the tape recorder running.

‘Shannon Dunne,’ I said, more to the tape than to her, ‘you’re here to tell us about Mark Dolan. You were dating him?’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘We were serious. It was going well. He had just introduced me to Brigit!’

‘Just?’ Another thing Brigit had failed to mention to us.

‘It was a delicate situation. I only met her for the first time on Tuesday. We went for coffee,’ she gave a little, throat-clearing laugh, ‘like it was a first date or something. Like we hadn’t been together for,’ she stumbled, and I could have sworn she was swallowing something back from the tip of her tongue. But there would be time to press for that later—first we needed to understand exactly how we missed something so major as the victim’s partner for a day and a half. ‘You know. It was weird. Like, he’d talk about her all the time but I was never allowed to see her. I couldn’t even go to his house, just in case she was home or showed up. We always met at mine. I came by once, early on, I was just in the area and I’d picked up a book that he wanted. He _lost_ it, what if Brigit had been around, what if she’d seen me and worked it out? I said, hey, if it mattered that much I would just say I was a friend but he said she’d _know._ It was creepy, like. I mean, I get that she was traumatized by her mother’s death. Who wouldn’t be, poor thing, even if she was a miserable woman when she was alive. But—’

‘Hang on,’ O’Neill jumped in, despite his promises. I knew what he was going to ask, and why—he had noticed the same pause I had, earlier on. But I also knew it could just as well have been asked in twenty minutes once Shannon had finished telling her story. I shot him a look but he had grabbed onto a thread and wasn’t letting go. ‘Are you saying you knew the family before Morna Dolan’s death?’ She glanced down at her chewed fingernails and took a few breaths, playing for time, for the first time behaving like a suspect.

‘I didn’t know _her,_ exactly,’ she drew the words out, her brows scrunched together in a thinking-hard gesture that reminded me for a second of my sister, before I brushed the thought away. ‘It was only—well, I knew him. Just…’ I knew where this line of enquiry was going, and while O’Neill might have wanted to take baby-steps to lead her there gently, we didn’t have time for it.

‘Listen, Shannon,’ I said, with enough authority in my voice that she stopped fidgeting and look up at me, ‘it’s going to come out sooner or later. Much better that it’s sooner and voluntarily. Were you having an affair with Mark Dolan before his wife died?’

‘You don’t understand,’ she looked from me to O’Neill, her voice quickening, ‘it was horrible for him in that house. She never paid him any attention, never said a kind word—to busy worrying about her own problems. She’d go to bed for days at a time and leave him to deal with just _everything._ And she must have known it was over, what could she expect, only he couldn’t leave her because Brigit was too young, Brigit was too fragile, Brigit needed her mother. That girl worshiped Morna, never could see how she was ruining Mark’s life.’ She stuttered to a halt, and I saw her face beginning to shutter again. I needed her to keep talking.

‘So that’s why Mark was so worried about you meeting Brigit, because she might have thought you were taking her mother’s place?’

‘Yes!’ Shannon perked up again, back on safer ground, ‘even after it had been years, Mark was always afraid Brigit would be angry. It wasn’t even about me, like, it was about him, everything he did was for her. He’d break off dates all the time, because something had come up with Brigit, she missed the bus and needed a ride, she wanted to go ice-skating. I thought it was all a bit much, to be frank, but the way she reacted when we met…’

‘How did she react, Shannon?’ This would be it, the clue we had been missing. I think part of me already knew, and from the way O’Neill’s foot was shaking under the desk I think he did, too. But we had to hear it.

‘She just about lost it. We were all round this table, like a proper family almost. And Mark said to her that he wanted her to meet someone very special—he said it all slow and careful, like she was a child—and that I was Shannon and I was going to be in their life a lot more because we were dating. And she said—didn’t even look at me, just got real quiet and asked him—how long? And he said _six months_ like I was just some fling, like we’d barely met. And I said to him, _Mark_ , and he gave me this glare, right through me. But she saw, and she kept pushing it, how long, how long, Dad? Poor Mark was stumbling over his answers, and I tried to calm her down but she didn’t even _look_ at me, I wasn’t even there to her, it was all about her dad. And then she said, she stood up and said like she was in a movie, You killed her. You killed her and now you’re killing her again.

‘She ran off, just stormed off like a child. And Mark, I tried to get him to talk—I mean, we’d been through a lot just then, _I’d_ been through a lot, but all he would talk about was finding Brigit and calming her down. And then he just left, left me to pick up the check and everything. Not that he was that kind of man, like, he was just upset. He called me later to apologize.’ O’Neill sat up a little straighter, I suppose because we were getting closer to the time of death, but very suddenly I was exhausted. I was bone-tired and just wanted Shannon Dunne out of the interview room, wanted to be reading rights and snapping on handcuffs and finishing the job instead of listening to this sad woman worry over the last few hours of her lover’s life. She glanced at me, something in my posture must have changed, but O’Neill nodded for her to continue.

‘He called and said it was all fine now, he’d smoothed things over with Brigit. She was just surprised and he should have warned her better, but she was making him dinner now and everything was going to be grand,’ she paused, realizing something that made her take a shuddering, sobbing breath, ‘that was the last thing he said to me. Everything was okay now and we were going to be grand.” She looked from me to O’Neill and started to sob in earnest, peeking between her fingers to see if either of us would offer a handkerchief. But O’Neill was busy packing up our papers as I said _interview terminated at 16:48_ to the machine and made for the door.

Some guys would have put on the flashers and siren all the way to the hotel where we were keeping Brigit Dolan. It makes them feel confident, powerful, or they’re so keyed up they have to do to it to make sure they’re not one second late. In Dublin traffic on a Thursday night, though, the flashers don’t really get you there any faster, and they’re like screaming a warning to your perp. I’ve known suspects with a guilty conscience to climb out their own windows at the sound of a siren four blocks away, or hide behind the sofa when the pizza delivery man knocks on the door. I didn’t want Brigit Dolan getting any more jumpy than she already was.

It looked bad on the incident report, that I took the Beemer and only one marked car and didn’t put on the lights, but by the time we left the station it didn’t make one bit of difference. Bridget’s body had been swinging gently from the ceiling fan, face bloated and blue and not the least bit gentle, curtain-pull cinched around her neck, for approximately three hours before we arrived. It was suicide, Cooper was kind enough to put on the pathology report as though that wasn’t obvious from the moment we walked into the room, O’Neill climbing on the bed to check her pulse though his stride said he knew it was just a formality, while I picked up the neatly-folded letter on the desk.

It was that note that I was still thinking about as I walked into the bar, after hours of processing and debriefing and the floaters and O’Neill telling each other that _no one was to blame_. It was written on the wide-spaced legal paper we use for writing up statements—she must have snuck some into her bag from the interrogation room—and was as neat and full of details as any formal confession we could have hoped for. There wasn’t much we didn’t already know, just the confirmation of a few suspicions— _I knew as soon as he introduced us that he’d been sleeping with her before mum died. I thought that must have been what finally pushed her over the edge, knowing dad was cheating on her—_ and the clarification of a few details— _he always had a late-night drink. I’m on tranquilizers, for anxiety, and I mixed in a handful when I poured out his whiskey. He was unconscious when I went out to the shed and got the gas for the lawnmower. I poured it all over him. He never woke up while I was in the house._ The end answered my last nagging questions, and I admit turned my stomach. _I dropped matches all over the house, starting upstairs in his bedroom and going down. I went down to the end of the road and waited, so nobody would see me standing there. For a while the flames were pretty, it was like the opposite of how he’d killed mam. I_ did _smoke a cigarette, from a pack I had hidden in my bag. And then I thought, no one will ever tell me to stop smoking again. So I called 999. I knew it was too late, the flames were really big, and that even if they got his body they’d find out I had drugged him. But I was hoping anyway._

I don’t believe in the rhetoric some detectives will spout about our duty to the dead. But I believe in our duty to the living, to make sure that the people who subvert the order of how things are supposed to be are found out, that their crimes are accurately recorded and their punishment is just and fitting. Brigit Dolan had taken all of that out of my hands, had done for me the job I should have been doing and had done it on her own terms—she had written her own confession in her own hand and chosen and executed her own punishment. By becoming her own judge and jury, by effectively writing me out of the equation, she had become a sort of personal vigilante. It wasn’t justice: it went against the rules.

I barely remember the rest of the day. Usually there is a satisfaction in paperwork—most detectives will palm it off on someone else once the exciting part of the case is over but I like tying up all the loose ends, making sure there’s nothing to trip us up in court. But there would be no court for this case, no trail, and the words blurred before my eyes and lost meaning pressed against the increasing desire to get out, get a drink, stop _thinking._

I waited for the double whiskey I had opted for instead of wasting time on pints, caught my own eye in the wide mirror over the bar. I found myself shaking, wanting to hit something, wanting to pull a Dina and stick both hands through the mirror and shake myself by the shoulders, tell myself to _get a fucking grip._ I wanted to watch people try to pull the shards of glass out of my hands, watch them cut themselves and pull away and leave me alone again. Maybe that was why, when I turned from the bar with my drink and saw Richie slumped against the wall on the far side of the room, looking up at me through his ridiculously long lashes even as he pretended to be staring at his hands, I didn’t just walk out. He was alone, back in the corner: maybe it was a rough day for him, too, and he wanted to drink in silence away from everyone he knew; maybe he was alone a lot now and I hadn’t noticed. But I glimpsed that constant, infuriating, hopeful expression that he invariably wore and I realized that, out of everyone I knew, Richie would be the one who tried to save me—who reached out and cut his hands and tore himself up on the barbed wire surrounding my soul—and I wanted to see it. Instead of slinking off to a corner I walked straight over to him, slammed my drink down on his low table, and sat across from him. His mouth physically dropped open for a second, and I had to bite back a smile at the realization that over a year in uniform had perhaps made Richie _worse_ at hiding his emotions. But actually,

‘You’re not wearing a uniform.’ He was wearing a suit, a new one in light grey that actually suited his bony build, better than anything else I had seen him in, anyway. ‘Did they promote you or throw you out?’

‘I’m back in Motor Vehicles,’ he was hunched in on himself—not a good look for someone already scrawny and barely five nine even with his hair sticking up, but it wasn’t my job to give him that kind of advice anymore—hands clenching each other tight. Fear, I realized; he was afraid of my reaction. ‘There were…favors. It’s not murder, but. I’m still…’ he trailed off. I got it, though: he was trying to prove to me that he was still being punished, that he was still suffering.

I didn’t hurry to fill the silence. We sat there, slumped in the too-low chairs with my long legs bumping his knees under the small, round table. I remembered thinking last night, how he would have handled the interview with Brigit so much better. Wondered if it was true, or if it would have mattered. He had known about Jenny Spain for more than twenty-four hours, would have kept silent for goodness knew how much longer. All that time I had been thinking he would be my ideal partner, and if we still worked together he probably would have kept his mouth shut about Brigit Dolan, too. He was looking at me again, that stupid sympathy in his face, and I wanted to hurt him so badly I felt it like sugar cubes crushed between my teeth.

‘You would have liked today,’ I said, knowing it was still a working investigation and I wasn’t supposed to talk about it and not caring a bit, ‘an eighteen-year-old girl hanged herself in the Marriott.’

His mouth opened again. I saw the question in his face but his brain caught up quick enough—he wasn’t slow, Richie. ‘She was guilty.’ Not a question, he knew.

‘She killed her father. Set the whole house on fire, starting with his body. And because we weren’t quick enough, she got the chance to decide killing herself was better than prison, better than justice and therapy and maybe getting out in ten years.’ 

Richie stayed quiet, studying me. Thinking. Leaned forward to say something unforgivable. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘Shut the fuck up!’ I almost shouted it, as though I was anything less than sure that in the simple scheme of cause-and-effect, it _was_ my fault. ‘She should have been in custody since yesterday. She should be in prison _now.’_

‘So you made a mistake,’ Richie was all earnest eyes, all wanting to make me feel better, still, as if that was what mattered. ‘and then you figured it out. It’s not like you let her go free.’

‘That’s _exactly_ what it’s like.’ I kept my volume even, aware that we were in a bar full or our colleagues, but I could hear my voice shaking, ‘She made her own choices. She escaped the rules. That’s not justice.’ I was so tired, suddenly, so done with the argument. I could have walked away then, and he probably wouldn’t have followed. But my legs wouldn’t move.

Richie nodded, as if he were feeding off my energy and the fight had gone out of him, too. We lifted our drinks at the same time and he half-smiled at me though the glass. I glared back. He shifted, and his knees knocked mine once more under the table. It was annoying and comforting all at once and I hated myself for not wanting him to pull away.

‘Did you notice the traffic North of the river today?’ Richie asked, indeterminate, slow minutes later, when I was warmed by the drink and the contact and almost ready to listen. I blinked. Richie didn’t do small-talk, one of the things I used to appreciate about him, and now seemed like an odd time to start. Was he that uncomfortable sitting in silence with me? I raised my head enough to give him a baffled glance, looked away. He let out a breath of a laugh. ‘Only, there was an accident on Dorsey Street. Lorry driver fell asleep at the wheel and slammed into a family in a Chevy. Shouldn’t even have been in the city, but he thought he’d found a short cut and wanted to take a few minutes of his trip time. Both parents are dead, and one of the kids. Other one woke up in hospital a few hours ago. I had to tell him. Guess he’ll be taken into care now.’

I had nothing to say to that, or to why he was telling me. Richie and I had never gone in for the heart-to-hearts other lads did, but I had the impression he didn’t have many people in his life. Not fourteen months ago, anyway. Maybe there wasn’t anyone else to tell. And at least he wasn’t trying to comfort me any longer. So I nodded, and stayed, and listened to his stories of traffic accidents and the absurd excuses people gave for why they were speeding, the man who had glued a dead leaf to his license plate in an effort not to be recognized on camera. I listened, even laughed sometimes, and the pub filled with people and noise, and I stayed.

‘I still think you’re wrong,’ Riche said, hours and a couple of drinks later, and before I could think better of it, I remembered why I liked him. Remembered the rookie, two weeks on the job, with the guts to tell me he disagreed with my approach. The way we tossed the ball back and forth during questioning, me solid and still, Richie full of nervous, dangerous energy; the satisfaction of knowing he was on my side. Those things I had drawn a thick, black line under. But here he was in my space again, not frightened off by fourteen months of cold silence and hard glares, telling me I was wrong again, and I stayed to listen. ‘I see people all the time, they’re dead or in hospital because they were getting milk from the corner store, walking their kid to school, and just happened to cross in front of the guy who forgot to have the 2000km checkup on his breaks, or someplace where the stop sign was grown over by vines. They didn’t do anything wrong, not even the driver usually, but leastwise never the victims. They didn’t ask for it. And I see them spin out of control, lose hold of their whole lives because they’re like you: they can’t stand that there’s not a reason. Not someone to blame. Thinking like that, it still just hurts people.’

‘No,’ I said; it washed out of me on a breath of relief. I hadn’t been sure, for a moment, for more than a year. But there in that dark bar, with Richie looking me in the eyes and telling me I was wrong, I knew that I wasn’t. The words were slippery like marbles in my mouth, but I grasped onto what I knew, for certain. ‘There are rules to how this world works. What we do matters.’

It was just a few words, and then both of us sitting back, falling unto the security of our own worlds even in the darkness, knees touching and for a minute not fighting: it was small, it was almost enough.

My car was still parked by the station, but it would be safe for the night: I was over the limit for driving and anyway I couldn’t stand the thought of being in such a tight space. The walk from the pub to my place isn’t far, and the weather was warm for the time of year, though with a hint of frost underneath. The humid breeze blowing through the city didn’t clear the air the way a good, cold wind did but sent scrap paper and empty coke cans in the gutter skittering their way along the road, creating a jumpy sort of movement that scraped against the corners of my eyes. I walked and Richie stuck by my side. I didn’t slow down when I saw how he had to take several shorter strides to catch up with my easy, long ones but I didn’t shoe him away either. The pavement was still wet from last night’s rain, the streetlights reflecting back up from the ground as though we were walking on a mirror. I felt the air shiver, just a little, in that way it does when there’s another person beside you—it’s warmth but it’s more than that, something staticky and addictive. Our conversation was still bouncing around my mind, afterimages of streetlights flickering behind my eyes as I saw the shadows of Richie’s accidents, flinched when a car squealed its breaks. If they had pulled the wheel around a second later, we would be dead. I don’t let myself think things like that, not often. There’s no point, dwelling on the negative: you’re just inviting it in. That night my mind lingered for a moment too long, chasing that deceptive pulse of pleasure that comes from giving into destructive longings. Riche didn’t flinch at all. 

We reached my corner, miles now from where I last remembered Richie living. I should have shaken him off like snow on my coat, gone to sit in my flat and pore over my shame and my fury as I poured out another drink. The fact that I didn’t want to twisted in my stomach, hard and cold and frightening, until I snapped at him,

‘Why are you still here?’

He glanced at me, surprised, uncertain.

‘It’s late. We’re still talking. And,’ he flushed, looked away, ‘I wanted to make sure you were okay.’

‘I don’t mean now’ I snapped: o _kay,_ as if he had a right to care, to say that. ‘I _do_ mean now but…always. You’re always looking at me. Like you’re worried. Like you care. We worked together for _three weeks_ , and it was a pretty shit three weeks, and you didn’t care much if I was _okay_ then.’

He drew in on himself, took a breath, looked up with wide-open eyes that said it took a lot for him to hold my gaze. Now that we were standing still I could feel the late-night cold reaching clammy fingers under my coat, down my neck. Richie shivered in his thin jacket. ‘I _did_ care. I cared about all of it: doing the only job I ever wanted,’ he swallowed, ‘protecting Jenny Spain. _And_ you. It was…we were partners. And now you’re….’

We were outside my building now, the street deserted except for a shimmer of streetlights reflected in ripples of puddled rain and oil, the flickering movement of rats skirting the rubbish bins. Up there I could see my windows from the street, dark and completely devoid of life. Down here was Richie, with his fighting words and his caring eyes, and I couldn’t make myself turn away toward that emptiness.

‘That case messed me up, too.’ He said into the silence, ‘I still think about it. About the house.’

‘It didn’t _mess me up_.’ Sympathy is the worst thing in the world: for a blinding second I was fifteen and being hugged by an endless stream of black-clothed women in strong perfume who had never given more than a cold nod to my mother when she was alive, twenty and listening to an instructor at Templemore tell me it was okay that I didn’t have any friends because I was probably just more mature than the rest of my class, I was watching a women whose sister had murdered her family look as though she wanted to comfort _me_ as I planted evidence for the first time in my life, I was letting O’Kelly clap me on the shoulder and tell me I was a good man to look after my sister. I was watching the one person I wanted to feel safe sharing my pain with—God knows why—feeling sorry for me and I couldn’t stand it. ‘Having my ‘partner’ conceal evidence to let a murderer go free was a bit of a blow, as you might imagine, but we got a conviction anyway. Case over.’

He flinched. I wondered how much he knew about how we got that evidence, how much he had guessed. I shouldn’t have cared, and yet I almost told him, then and there. How I had crossed a line, had found myself capable of doing it, how I could never be sure of any lines ever again.

‘It’s not, though, Mick.’ He said, and I hated that his voice was steady. Hated that some sharp, hidden part of me was glad he understood even as I knew I needed to push him far enough away that his eyes would blur and he would un-know my weakness. ‘I know it’s not. You’re not…it’s like I said: if you’ve got a problem, I’ve got a problem. And…I see you. You’re not the same.’

‘Shut the hell up.’ I snapped, and it felt like a shot of pure oxygen, physically pushing him away, a knock to the shoulder that left him stumbling slightly, catching himself on the rough brick wall of the building opposite mine. I turned to go, fishing in my pocket for keys and trying to slow my heart rate. ‘And mind your own business. I’m fine.’

Richie actually laughed, then, a cold, shattered sort of laugh. ‘You’re not _fine_!’

‘What do you want from me?’ I spun around, letting the anger cloud my eyes for a moment, slammed his back against the wall, my face close to his, felt his quick breaths on my cheek. I was still riding that high that came from losing control, from breaking the frosted glass and letting someone see how cut up inside I was, the danger left a sweet taste in my mouth that mixed with the different, equally terrifying thrill of feeling Richie’s body pressed up against mine, familiar and solid, and seeing colors in his eyes I had never let myself notice before.

‘This,’ he said, he _dared_ to say, ‘something real.’ Because I couldn’t hit him, I kissed him, hard. Tasted blood where my teeth had caught his lip. He was still scrawny, all awkward angles, but solid, and _there,_ and I relished the sharp dig of his hips, his shoulder blades, the bright sparks of pain as my knuckles scraped the brick as I crushed him against the cold wall. He opened his mouth against mine and dug his fingers into my back, and I could still taste blood but it didn’t matter.

‘You said you still think about the house.’ I breathed against his mouth. It was half a question, though I don’t know why I asked it, didn’t know what the right answer would be.

‘I dream that I’m Jenny. I walk through it all. All the time.” His voice was tight and empty as though even the act of recalling had hollowed him out. We were so far from the day he had brought me coffee outside the morgue, from the way I said _my partner_ as though it was real, was easy. No one in the force would ever properly trust Riche again, I would always carry a weight that felt so much heavier than a metal bracelet in my pocket. There was no one besides the two of us who would ever understand. I reached for that hollowness, breathed it in as if I could blend it with my own.

‘You don’t feel sorry for me.’ It wasn’t an ask, it was an order, a demand, but he answered anyway.

‘No,’ he said, and I believed him.

The warm air from our breaths mingled and rose in freezing clouds, disappearing in the rippling space between empty windows above. Richie was shivering again, leaning away from the cold brick wall, arms around my waist. Looking at me and tilting his head toward the door of my building, a backwards sort of invitation. He wasn’t trying to fix me, I realized, someone who sleepwalked through that evil house, putting the children forever to sleep, too close to the insatiable pull of the mindless ocean. Some things couldn’t be fixed, not ever. When I stepped away the sleeve of his jacket was still crushed in my hand, and he stumbled a little trying to follow. I looked down, couldn’t let go. Some things couldn’t be fixed, and you lived with it, and you kept on living.

Only when I dropped my key instead of fitting it into the lock did I realize how cold my hands had gotten. I dropped Richie’s sleeve, hoping that when I turned back he would still be there. My flat held the same threatening energy it had for so long, and I had to hold myself back from flicking on every light, checking every corner. The bells of the church, carried through the silent city air, rang twelve. Richie shifted on his feet, stepped closer, rocked back on his heels. He should have been running from this dark, empty house. He wasn’t. He took a breath and touched a hand to my cheek, and for a moment I didn’t understand why, but it didn’t matter. I reached back, not alone, cleared my throat.

‘Come to bed. Not like—just not to leave.’ He nodded.

Much later I shifted my weight to check the time on the clock-radio and he stirred beside me, squinting in the early-morning dark, smiling. ‘Still here?’ I asked, though the answer was obvious and the deeper question it contained wasn’t one I was sure I was ready to ask.

‘Still here,’ he said, curling into my side and sinking back into sleep. When I got up there would be statements to check and re-check, a file to close and new ones to open. Sometime in the next few days, in the absence of any next of kin, the state would hold a burial for Brigit Dolan and I would be there, just to see that one, final thing done right. But that morning, with the sun barely starting to light the gray sky, I was warm and Richie was beside me and the dangerous rush of the waves that had rocked me into fitful sleep every night since that case blended with his breathing, soft and steady. 

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “I Need My Girl” by the National this is my thing now I guess.  
> I wrote this over the winter and then got anxious about posting it in case I wanted to strip it for parts and use the story somewhere else. I was talking @greenapricot (hey! This fic even has a National title!) and decided to do it.  
> I got course credit for this and it’s one of my greatest accomplishments  
> I started with just a thing that was going to be about Kennedy and getting better at talking to people but then ended up spending weeks working up the Dolan murder case and frankly I'm super happy with it and kind of want to write procedurals now.  
> All my knowledge of Dublin comes from Tana French books, Google maps, and tourist websites. That said, Beckett Bridge is weird.


End file.
